"This spring, first-year students in the Macaulay Honors Program at Hunter College undertook interdisciplinary research projects that wove together interviews, photographs and other media to stitch portraits of 110 small businesses throughout the city," according to an article by Jessica Leigh Hester that appeared in Citylab, an online section of The Atlantic magazine. "Then, they produced Storefront Survivors , an online resource of dispatches from the small-business owners who have managed to eke out a living in a climate that has brought the axe down on so many mom-and-pop stores."

Supervising the students' projects was Professor Michael Benediktsson of the Sociology Department, who is "fascinated by the role stores play in social cohesion, and building, maintaining, and stabilizing neighborhoods over time." In an interview published on the website Jeremiah's Vanishing New York Q&A in Vanishing NY , Benediktsson called the project "a collaboration between three CUNY urban sociologists– Sharon Zukin of Brooklyn College, Rich Ocejo of John Jay, and me...The motive for this was partly pedagogical and partly our own sociological curiosity. Having our students interview small business owners turned out to be a great way to humanize some of the abstract issues that we were talking about in class – topics like gentrification, immigration, ethnic succession, and urban planning."